17 Jul 2011

A postponement and an opportunity

I was scheduled to have dental surgery this last Friday – something I’d been waiting to have done since February and had had the appointment for since early May – and for reasons I won’t bore you with, I’ve had to postpone it, much to my significant annoyance.

But having expected to be out of action for a few days, or at least a bit below par, I’d been working towards the date for a couple of weeks, trying to get ahead of myself with both work commitments and household chores – and had done a pretty good job of organising myself.

Please click on any of the photographs to see a larger view.

I haven’t been very far this week, so my only photographic opportunities have been local. In this case, I was trying out different film simulation modes on my camera. This one is Astia – a little rich for my taste, but with saturation reduced too, it might give very nice results.

Consequently when it was cancelled for this week, I found myself with some time available that hadn’t been planned and was reluctant to just squander it by just getting on with my usual routine. So I decided to use the opportunity to make something totally new – not just replacing the stock I’d sold, or on customer orders, which had taken up most of my recent ‘making’ time – but something completely from scratch from the massive pile of as yet unmade sketches in my book.

I’ve always had a thing for daisies – they’re just perfectly beautiful and I always have them in my garden. Whilst messing with the close up filters when the sun was low, I noticed how gorgeous this was underneath when backlit. It pays us to occasionally just look at things we take for granted, beauty – and I do love the gorgeous abstract nature manages – is right there under our noses.

So as I finished my breakfast on Thursday I perused my sketchbook to see what leapt out at me first and took my fancy. I pondered the shapes and tallied this in my mind with materials I had available and as I progressed to washing the breakfast pots – a task I’ve often posted that I consider to be quality and valued thinking time – my mind went off on its own, taking some of the shapes I’d reviewed and developing them further. As it does.

Mr Boo had one of his ‘brainwaves’ whist walking the other evening – he thought a slightly different route home would be nice – although it was rather further than he’d remembered and we were fighting off invisible ninjas all the way through long grasses. But we were rewarded by the odd gorgeous scene as the evening sun filtered through the trees.

I considered mobius rings and the idea of twists and by the time I was pulling the plug out of the sink, one particular shape was already settled as the one I wanted to try. As with many metalwork designs, you have to consider the methodology carefully – working out in which order to form the shapes – when to hammer which bit and where to place any soldered joins, so at this point I almost always work a prototype in copper first – especially as this was a design that I thought lent itself to highly polished silver and I wasn’t even sure it would work, or what size to start with.

For example, I made these earrings in this session too, as they were long overdue to match the larger pendant I made a little while ago. I found out the hard way – as we often do – that it’s vital to work in a particular order – and in this case, the curved curly cut ends must be polished and pretty much finished at the very first stage, as once you make up the heart, you can’t get to the ends in order to finish them to the same standard as the rest. This particular shape, like many, needs hammering in a particular order too as you form the shape.

And this is where my design journal earns its keep – I initially make rough notes as I work in my sketch book – often changing it as I work it through – when satisfied, I write this up in my proper final design journal and this acts as a recipe book for my designs. If you find something out the hard way, there’s no value in repeating the lesson next time you make the design – that just wastes time and materials.

I’ve always had a passion for very simple designs with clean lines – but you can only pull this off if you do it well – your workmanship has nowhere to hide, so you have to do a damn good job with it. I still haven’t reached the stage where I can produce results of this nature to the level of perfection I’d like, but only practice will improve me.

I wanted to make a teardrop pendant from a single loop where it was twisted at the top to form an integral bail – one closed enough to prevent it slipping off the chain and turning upside down, but clearly visually all one sinuous shape.

I grabbed an already soldered copper loop, that I’d stretched to an oval, to work out the details and was incredibly happy that it worked just as I hoped – I learnt enough through the process to know what order I needed to work in and made the appropriate pencil scribbles in my sketchbook. Then grabbed a length of silver. I wanted it slightly larger than the copper with more of a teardrop and less of the ellipse the copper had become.

With the first one, I hammered an area that I decided would work better if left round and hammered later, so on the third version, I felt I got exactly what my mind had visualised – exactly the shape I hoped for and I was delighted with the result.

I now want to work on the method a little more to see if I can make it with less tool marks – it doesn’t matter sometimes how well you dress your tools or the care with which you work, when you apply considerable force to metal, it’s sometimes inevitable and unavoidable.

I’ve now part-worked a third version in Sterling silver by a method my subconscious has worked out in the meantime and it’s already looking better.

I suspect that this was considerably more fun than I was scheduled to have on Friday and I feel that it was a suitable outcome from finding myself with a creative opportunity that I didn’t want to squander.

7 Jul 2011

We managed to eat lunch al fresco every day

I apologise for my posting tardiness of late, but between work commitments and a recent holiday, I haven’t been able to find the time to do it justice – or if I’m honest, I’ve not really had anything much of interest to say.

So, for now, I’ll just post some photographs from our recent ‘summer’ stay in the Lake District. Incredibly and unusually, after our lovely spell there over the Easter period, we also had largely gorgeous weather this time too. There were odd periods of rain or occasional showers, but they never happened when we were actually outside and it didn’t divert us from our plans.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.
Sea Thrift growing along the shoreline at Arnside in Cumbria, one of my favourite spots to feel the breeze through my hair – and on this particular evening, there was a lot of breeze to feel. Combined with dampness it made a right old mess of my hair.

We can always get a snapshot of the success level of a holiday with regard to weather by how we eat our lunch – we are almost always out for the day, with a recent habit of doing our walking when we arrive at our chosen location, taking a snack to eat with us at a suitable spot part way along our route, returning to the car for lunch, which is often quite a bit later than lunchtime by then.

The goldfinches just loved the seeds from the thistles growing in the orchard beside the caravan.
I’ve seen Mum doing this, how hard can it be?

Sometimes we eat where we’ve parked, often we move to a favoured spot where we know a good sheltered or quiet place to park or where there are picnic tables. If there are no picnic tables, we have a system of setting up a ‘table’ in the hatchback of the car and eating lunch there standing up. It probably sounds a little odd, but it works really well and we’ve practiced and perfected a technique that really suits us. We also have an [unfortunately] practiced technique for eating inside the car where conditions outside are unsuitable.

The skies were largely blue with fluffy white clouds, which made a delightful change.
Perhaps if we took ready-made butties for lunch, life would be so much easier, but where’s the fun in that? We tend to take fresh bread and an assortment of cheeses, meat and pate and just have a little of whatever we fancy.

It has always been a bit of a challenge having to organise fresh bread or needing to shop every few days when you don’t have much of a freezer, but the last couple of trips we’ve used part-baked rolls that have a long use by date and can be baked fresh each morning whilst we have breakfast. We supplemented this by making our own bread too (an easy soda bread where we measured and took batches of the dry ingredients ready prepared and bagged and just combined with a carton of buttermilk), made life significantly easier and we don’t know why we haven’t thought of it before – it has worked like a charm and freed up that shopping time to be out in the fresh air. And saved us a considerable amount of pennies too – appreciated as this was very much a holiday on a tight budget.

So, judging by that criteria, the fact that we didn’t have to retreat to the inside the car for lunch any day we were away, makes it a pretty good holiday – weather-wise at least. It certainly adds to the pleasure when you’re blessed with sunshine in which to enjoy the gorgeous scenery.

I love the tilt screen on the camera that allows me to take low shots like this without getting muddy knees and eliminating the need for lots of trial and error using the self-timer.

I was extremely delighted to snag my first proper dragonfly photograph – taken with the maximum zoom as it was about 6 feet away down a steep marshy bank and I had no option to get any closer – largely as my husband refused to hold my ankles.

Further to earlier comments about my most recent camera, which turned out to be faulty, was returned and repaired, came back seemingly fixed, but wasn’t, was returned and I paid the upgrade fee to get the newer, now currently on sale, model. Thankfully, it performed flawlessly and I realise that my original camera was never right and the problems I had with it from the start were not the user error I blamed myself for, but it was genuinely faulty. So I’m much, much happier with it now and can concentrate on composition and creativity rather than trying to get the camera to focus properly etc.

We went past the pig farm that has an outdoor pen several times whilst up there and this little chap was by far the tiniest piglet in there and he saw me from right across the enclosure and set off to investigate, but was waylaid en route by another piglet wanting to play, so I never got to tickle him.
“OK, own up, who farted?”

On the lane up to the farm we stay at there was a little group of bunnies playing one evening at the field perimeter and we weren’t sure whether they were hares or rabbits – as we have seen hares in that spot previously. I was taking a few shots in far too low light levels, just to give me the chance to identify them properly, when this chap popped his head up out of the long grass – and disappeared again before I got chance to snag him. So I spotted where he’d been and pre-focused, hoping for a reappearance, which he made again briefly. Not the best image by any measure, but it amused the heck out of me.

And as often happens, we were delayed several times with holiday traffic jams:

And you can probably make up your own caption for this particular shot:

“Well, just come back over the same way you climbed over in the first place!”


Full gallery:

The rest of my holiday collection are in one of my on-line photo galleries.

Panoramic photograph of Tarn Hows:

One of the photographic areas that has always fascinated me is in creating panoramas and wide angle shots in general – you’ll notice that many scenics and landscape shots I take are at very wide angles.

I haven’t created a new panorama for a while – although I’m sure I’ve got lots of saved frames waiting for my attention – but I took a series of 5 overlapping frames to test out the new camera’s suitability for this process. Although the starting frames weren’t very good (some were a bit underexposed and dark for starters, due to the huge contrast across the scene), I’ve managed to do some work with them and make something good enough to reassure me that it will work well for me in future. Creating panos requires meticulous preparation when taking the frames to ensure that the individual photographs all have the same exposure and are focused in the same plane and positioned and overlapped so that they will line up carefully to give rise to an accurate and tidy stitch of the individual photographs when brought together.

This is Tarn Hows in the Lake District, from one of the less popular paths. 5 individual photographs stitched together.

If you click through from the image above it will give you a medium sized copy to view, but if you’d like to see it larger, this link leads to a larger version.

15 Jun 2011

Close up photography experiments

Apologies for the lack of recent updates, my husband and I were both laid low with one of those nasty, once in about 15 years, coughs and colds. Those ones that are so unpleasant that you will remember them clearly for many years to come. It was all I could do to ensure that I looked after customers properly and get from one day to the next. Sleep was hard to achieve, so I’m trying to catch up on that a little now too.

It perhaps serves me right for feeling a little smug that we’d both survived about 3 winters without either of us succumbing to much more than a modest sniffle – we’d managed to avoid all the bugs that do the rounds and were in decent health when those around us were struck down. So it would appear that we were paid back by getting all three winters worth in one dose.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.

It’s lovely in summer months to get out for an evening walk whilst dinner is in the oven and Monday evening gave us such an opportunity after a rather grey day.

I have also been without my most recent camera for some weeks whilst it was repaired under warranty, but having picked it back up at the weekend, it appeared to be fixed – and it’s true that the major problem had been cured with a new lens and sensor unit – but there are still restless ghosts in the machine and I’ve taken the shop manager up on his offer of upgrading to the newer replacement model by paying the difference in their prices. They can’t replace it directly as they can’t get the model any more.

I’ve taken this scene very many times and can’t resist walking past and taking another – I was actually looking for two families of young ducks who live on this stretch of river, but they were obviously all off on adventures.

I would actually have the new model in my sticky mitts right now, as I’d worked out a convoluted way of walking and bus journeys to attend to several errands in one trip today, but I totally forgot to get out and take with me the camera receipt and had to return home and cancel my plans – I’m livid about it and have no one to blame but myself. Having been very good for about 2 weeks, I was going to treat myself to something nice for lunch too – so now I will have to raid the store cupboard instead. Serves me right really, I deserve to be punished.

Having collected the repaired camera on Saturday morning, I was keen to do some work with it to ensure it was now working well before we go away next week, so I fired off quite a lot of assorted shots to check how it was working and a few during a walk on a rare nice evening on Monday.

I was rather surprised at how well my camera and close up filters worked when I saw the detail in the face.

One of the things I was keen to try with it was to do some close ups with some additional close up filters. I didn’t even know if they would work with a digicam of this nature (I usually use them with my DSLR and lenses), so dug them out to have a go. They seem to work pretty well, by shortening the minimum focus distance for any particular focal length (i.e. zoom) – allowing you to focus on something that bit closer than usual and thereby increasing the size of the subject on the sensor.

The tiny pollen encrusted parts of these honeysuckle flowers look like sugared sweeties.

The definition of macro is that the subject is captured at 1:1 scale on the sensor or film plane – or better. So most digicams, despite having ‘macro’ modes aren’t capable of actually capturing true macro photographs, they’d be more appropriately described as close ups. For example, the camera in question has a sensor 6.17mm x 4.55mm in area, so to capture a macro photograph, something 6.17mm wide would totally fill the photograph from left to right.

This particular bee with a taste for my lavender got rather camera shy and would vanish when I started taking photos, so I had to get sneaky to catch him in action.

But the addition of the close up filters (+3 dioptre in this case) – which it transpired were a different size from the front screw mount of my lens – so had to be hand held in front of it – clearly allowed a little extra magnification. My technique whilst working in this manner needs some work (I was just tinkering very quickly to see if it had merit before buying filters the right size) and I think the filters I have are rather poor in quality and I was getting some terrible colour halos around any edges catching the light. But I think it might be interesting to play some more with them and work out the maximum magnification and a suitable working distance to optimise the potential. I think it’s something that I will enjoy working at.

Just as soon as I get my replacement camera that is – and the sun coming back out would help too, please!

Aren’t lavender flowers a complex structure when you look at them closely.
22 May 2011

A hidden gem we’ve walked past many times

I’ve just realised that this is my 100th blog post here – I had intended to mark the occasion with something more in keeping with the milestone, but it’s nearly midnight on a Sunday evening and to be blunt, my imagination and flair has totally deserted me, so apologies that it’s not something more worthy.

Please click on any of the photographs to see a larger view.

Whilst we were away over the Easter period the Fuji bridge camera I had been given for a recent big birthday to use as a walk-around camera when I didn’t want to be weighed down with the bug guns, had developed assorted faults and is currently back with the manufacturer to be looked at, under warranty. There is clearly something amiss with the sensor and a whole collection of small, somewhat intermittent, but increasingly frequent, niggly problems – like it won’t switch off or on, won’t change mode etc. At first I put them down to quirks of the model, but when you lose shots because of them, or get home and find that several frames you took that day were totally out of focus, something really has to be done with it.

The fabulous gardens as Sizergh Castle in the Lake District – I have already published a photograph of this scene from a JPEG file – but having opened up the RAW file and seeing how much better the tonality of it is, as well as how much further detail I have been able to bring out, it has made me question my workflow all over again.

I had been happy with my Easter photos until I opened the ones taken with my DSLR. But considering this camera and lens combination cost about 7 times the amount of my new camera, it jolly well should show it up.

None of the very many photographs I took of this scene with different cameras really did it justice, with the low early evening sun filtering through the spring foliage and warming up the fragrance from the bluebells.

So whilst I’m without it, it has given me the opportunity to work on some photographs I’d taken recently that I hadn’t done anything with yet and to give further thought to some of my concerns over the image files I get from it – and my perpetual quandary since getting it on how best to use it – I’ve never quite been able to get colours right in landscapes (which I think my Easter collection helped me to make decisions) and can’t settle on just working with out of camera JPEG image files, or to do the extra work of using RAW files which give better results, but are more work – and the software provided for doing so is rather clunky to use, somewhat discouraging that approach and the frustration it invariably brings.

Bluebells nestled amongst bright spring green emerging foliage – one of my favourite things.

I was pretty happy with the photographs I took over Easter (largely as JPEGs) until I worked on both some images I took with the much larger and heavier DSLR (which at the time of buying, the cost – with the ultra wide angle lens I like to use – cost about 7 times this other newer camera, so it jolly well should show it up) and also some of the frames I took with the bridge camera in a RAW format and developed into images myself using software – a slightly tedious process, but certainly yielding better results.

So whilst I’ve been tinkering and trying different post-processing settings, which has been a really worthwhile process for me, I found a series of photographs I took before we went away at Easter and had temporarily forgotten about. We moved to this area about 29 years ago when we got married – we commuted to the area for work for 3 months initially, whilst we looked for a house and planned a wedding, moving here properly when we returned from honeymoon.

The area surrounding the reservoir was once farmland with assorted cottages and farms and it’s always fascinating to see the gateposts and walls remaining from such previous occupiers. I wonder how many modern gateposts would withstand the passage of time in this manner

On the moors above us is a reservoir which has a 2Km walk around it and we do this lap very often, having walked it many, many times in those 29 years. And regular readers will know how much I love walking in woodland and how important being amongst trees is for me.

Off to one side is a steep narrow path disappearing into the trees and we only recently set off up that path to see where it took us. I’m actually now pretty cross that we’ve walked past it dozens of times without ever realising that it adds an extra loop into the walk through a most unexpectedly gorgeous wooded area.

It just goes to show that even little gems like that can be right under your nose without you knowing, or appreciating it. I can’t see us missing out that loop many times in future – although I think it might be tricky walking if it’s especially wet or icy – which it often is when we do that walk.

The leaves were just emerging when we were up there in April, but I hope to be back there very soon when I expect that the green will have exploded from what you see in these photographs. I’m really looking forward to it – and to my camera coming home too – I’m sorely missing it.

Turquoise dyed magnesite beads with double coiled antiqued copper. I wanted something with smaller beads to match the large chalk turquoise beads I use in necklaces, for those that prefer a more discreetly-sized earring.

Work-wise this last week I’ve been a good girl and caught up a little on photographing my backlog of finished pieces. I can seemingly make much faster than I can photograph (that’s no doubt more to do with my motivation, making is so much more fun) and list pieces and I find the perpetual backlog really tiresome. But I set myself some deadlines last week and actually met them. I’m hoping to reward myself with some quality bench time to tackle some new ideas this week.